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Including the excluded: communitarian paths to cosmopolitanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2010

EDUARD JORDAAN
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Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is frequently criticised for overlooking the situatedness of morality and the importance of solidarity in their aspiration to global justice. A number of thinkers take these criticisms seriously and pursue ‘a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’. Four such approaches are considered. All four view morality and justice as grounded in a specific social setting and hold that justice is more likely to result if there is some ‘we-feeling’ among people, but are simultaneously committed to expanding the realm of justice and moral concern to beyond national boundaries. To enable the theorisation of an expanded realm of situated justice and moral concern, community is conceived as not necessarily corresponding to political boundaries and the moral the self is seen as able and eager to loosen some of its traditional moral connections and to form new ones. Unfortunately, these approaches are likely to exclude significant segments of the world's population from the expanded realm of moral concern they theorise, most notably, a large proportion of the world's poor. It is suggested that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas might offer a way of reducing the gap between solidarity and moral universalism.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , December 2011, pp. 2365 - 2385
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

Introduction

Two significant obstacles confront cosmopolitan aspirations to global justice. First, it is a central tenet of cosmopolitanism that ‘every human being has a global stature as ultimate unit of moral concern’,Footnote 1 yet the reality is that we tend to be more concerned for some than for others. In debates about global justice, the most important dividing line is nationality: we assign more moral weight to fellow members of our political community than we do to outsiders. The fact that thousands die every day from preventable, poverty-related causes suggest the extent to which we have failed to treat the global poor as ultimate units of moral concern, while reference to universal principles of justice, basic rights, and duties not to harm the poor by imposing a skewed economic order upon them indicates our failure to meet some of the lowest standards of justice. Authors closer to the communitarian side of things inform us that the sacrifices required for social justice are easier to extract when there is some sense of communal belonging among those subject to a scheme of justice.Footnote 2 It is accurate to say that the lack of solidarity with the poor beyond our borders continues to inhibit a more just and generous treatment of them. While a sense of solidarity with the global poor is implicit in cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitans are reluctant to invoke our common humanity, probably because whatever solidarity exists pales against the pull of national and local loyalties.

A second obstacle relates to the source of justice. During the so-called ‘liberal-communitarian debate’ in political philosophy, communitarians argued against their principal target, Rawls's book A Theory of Justice,Footnote 3 that the same principles of justice do not hold in all political communities, as Rawls seemed to imply, but derive from the choices, values and circumstances of specific bounded political communities. So, when Rawls emphasised in his later work that his ‘justice as fairness is intended as a political conception of justice for a democratic society, it [therefore] tries to draw solely upon basic intuitive ideas that are embedded in the political institutions of a constitutional democratic regime and the public traditions of their interpretation’,Footnote 4 the liberal-communitarian debate fizzled out and an understanding of justice as tied to a particular community gained in stature. The view that justice finds its most authentic expression when agreed upon by members of a relatively closed political community has also been used against cosmopolitans who argue that justice should be global in scope.Footnote 5

Most cosmopolitans continue to argue that universal obligations and principles of justice can be derived through abstraction and that the mere recognition of our complicity in maintaining an unjust global order or our failure to meet certain duties will spur us into working for greater global justice. However, there are a few cosmopolitan theorists who accept an understanding of justice as situated and who take seriously the importance of solidarity in achieving social justice, that is, they accept certain central communitarian premises, while at the same time remaining committed to the goal of cosmopolitan justice. The theoretical route they map out may be described, in Richard Shapcott's terms, as a ‘communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’Footnote 6 and entails starting from a specific community and from there gradually expanding the realm of justice and moral concern to a point of universal inclusion. These authors retain from the communitarian critics of cosmopolitanism an understanding of morality and justice as grounded in a specific social setting and the view that justice and moral regard are more likely to follow where there is some measure of solidarity among people. However, this group of authors parts ways with narrower forms of communitarianism through their commitment to expand and deepen the realm of justice and moral concern to beyond national boundaries, as well as in their effort to loosen (but not abandon) the hold of local loyalties and put in its place a form of solidarity that is at least thicker than that found in impartialist cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, to make possible the theorisation of an expanded realm of justice and moral concern, community is conceived as not necessarily corresponding to political boundaries, the self is held to be able to loosen some of its traditional moral connections and to form new ones and is frequently inscribed with an element that drives it towards the other out of moral concern. The four approaches discussed below put the West at the centre of the expanding moral community they envision, an expansion that is driven largely by moral self-questioning internal to the West, rather than by pressure from those on the outside clamouring for moral consideration by the West. Placing the West at the centre of an expanding moral realm makes sense because the global institutional order that continues to cause unnecessary harm to the world's poor,Footnote 7 remains a Western-dominated oneFootnote 8 and global reforms in favour of the world's poor are unlikely to come about without buy-in and sacrifice from the rich societies of the West.

This article identifies and describes four communitarian paths to cosmopolitanism: the first centres on the ideas of Richard Rorty; the second can be found in the Habermas-inspired writing of Andrew Linklater; the third draws its inspiration from Gadamer and can be found in the writings of Richard Shapcott and to a lesser extent Fred Dallmayr; while the fourth considers the most recent contribution on this matter, Toni Erskine's embedded cosmopolitanism. The four approaches I am examining differ from other well-known accounts of situated cosmopolitanism, such as those of Bhabha and Appiah.Footnote 9 Both Bhabha and Appiah emphasise the significance of local loyalties, but do not provide an account of how people move towards more universal solidarity. In Bhabha's account of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, the goal is not movement towards a universal moral community that unites the privileged and disadvantaged, but rather solidarity among the dispossessed. Appiah's account of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ does endorse the idea of a universal moral community, but he starts from the premise that this sort of cosmopolitanism is always already part of our moral outlook, and that the task is simply to balance the local and the global. Neither, therefore, specifically addresses the idea of a ‘path’ to cosmopolitanism – that is, the nature of the movement by which local loyalties are loosened and solidarity expanded. This is the challenge addressed by the four authors I am considering.

The first, longer part of this article considers the four communitarian paths to cosmopolitanism. The significance of these four communitarian paths to cosmopolitanism lies in their aspiration to mitigate the opposition between those who opt for a view of justice and morality as contextual and bounded versus those who see justice and morality as impartial and universal, as well as in overcoming the conservative consequences of seeing justice and moral regard as situated in primarily national settings. If this aspiration is realised, it would be a major step forward in debates about global justice. The primary aim of this article is to show that unfortunately, however, these approaches are likely to exclude significant segments of the world's population from the expanded realms of moral concern they are likely to create, most notably, a large proportion of the world's poor. It is hard to see how approaches that purport to be cosmopolitan but are likely to exclude large numbers of people can still lay claim to the label of cosmopolitanism. It is therefore necessary to rely on a form of cosmopolitanism with immediate universal scope. In order for this article to offer more than mere criticism, in the second, shorter part I pursue a secondary aim, where it will be suggested that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas can be used to infuse and support universalist cosmopolitanism with a form of solidarity, based not on shared membership of a morally significant group, but on the open-ended and asymmetrical responsibility of the self for the other.

Rorty's ironic liberalism

Rorty is very aware that ‘it is hard to be both enchanted with one version of the world and tolerant of all others’.Footnote 10 As Rorty sees it, the conflict between our loyalty to fellow citizens and the consideration we give outsiders, is not a conflict between loyalty and justice, but rather a conflict between different loyalties or solidarities.Footnote 11 Rorty regards the insistence that we should be concerned for someone simply because he is a human being as ‘a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action’.Footnote 12 Rather, moral regard for others is a matter of we-feeling, a recognition of others as ‘one of us’. For Rorty, our moral identity is a result of the group or groups with which we identify and a moral dilemma is being forced to choose between loyalty to different groups which we cannot alienate and still ‘like’ ourselves.Footnote 13 For Rorty, there is no universal, objective standpoint from which to resolve these conflicting loyalties. Moreover, Rorty rejects the universalism and impartiality usually associated with cosmopolitanism, yet he nevertheless states that a ‘global, cosmopolitan’ society is one of his ‘social hopes’.Footnote 14 So, how does one move towards a cosmopolitan society, especially in light of Rorty's view that we either ‘attach a special privilege to our own community, or we pretend an impossible tolerance for every other group’?Footnote 15

The answer lies in the self's ability to expand her moral loyalties. The self does not have an essence, but stands at the crossroads of different social narratives and mostly understands herself in terms of the ones in which she was brought up.Footnote 16 It is important for Rorty's purposes to have a conception of the self that does not cling to its identity too tightly and who is even willing to push away local loyalties and identities. The willingness to rearrange and expand one's moral sympathies resides most strongly in a figure Rorty calls a ‘liberal ironist’. Ironists recognise the contingency of their identities and moral affiliations and fear that they have ‘been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game’ and that they will only come to know ‘the people in their own neighbourhood’.Footnote 17 These concerns lead the ironist to explore new vocabularies and the lives of strange people, families and communities.Footnote 18 She is helped along in particular by texts that illuminate the lives of people once thought of as strange, that give us the terms to redescribe ourselves and others, and that help us to notice cruelty and oppression where previously we saw nothing wrong. New descriptions alter the way we regard others and our relationships with them and thus clear the way for a reconfiguration of our moral relationships. But irony alone is not enough, for on its own it runs the risk of frivolity, hence Rorty's tendency to attach irony to liberalism. A liberal is someone who thinks that ‘cruelty is the worst thing we do’ and for whom what matters is ‘making sure she notices suffering when it occurs’ and not worry about finding a reason to care about suffering.Footnote 19

Liberal irony combines a concern for the suffering of other people with the desire to pay more attention to people once thought of as strange. While ‘[w]e always have to start from where we are’, it becomes possible to redescribe ourselves in ways that bring more and different people into view and to recognise them as being like us, to see ‘strange people as fellow sufferers’.Footnote 20 It is through stories, preferably ‘long, sad, sentimental’ ones, that we ‘the rich, safe, powerful people [have come] to tolerate and even to cherish powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identities, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation’.Footnote 21 The creation of new solidarities is a gradual process, they have to be created ‘out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-language which all of us recognise when we hear it’.Footnote 22

While one can be an ironist everywhere, it is in a liberal society that she feels most comfortable, for in such a society a plurality of views, orientations and lifestyles are protected, even encouraged. Liberal society gives considerable prominence to novelists, poets, journalists, film-makers, even social scientists and philosophers, for these are the people who put forward new descriptions of other people and explanations of our impact on them. In recent times, actors, pop stars, ‘infotainment’ television channels, even comedians have also come to play a role in bringing to the fore injustice and overlooked lives.Footnote 23 However, in Rorty's view, there is more to liberal society than the protection of ‘connoisseurs of difference’.Footnote 24 It is a society that constantly tries to get rid of the ‘curse’ of ethnocentrism, of the blind spots that come from having to ‘start from where we are’. Liberal society fights against its ‘ethnocentrism’ by ‘constantly adding on more windows, constantly enlarging its sympathies’.Footnote 25 Rorty claims that part of the liberal tradition is ‘that the human stranger from whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity’.Footnote 26 Once the formerly excluded and degraded have been brought in, their dignity restored, they ‘are treated just like all the rest of us’.Footnote 27

New descriptions help us to see strange people as ‘fellow sufferers’.Footnote 28 However, all strangers are not at the same distance from our moral regard. Those on the doorstep of our moral regard, of being included as one of us, are persons who already have some power of expression, people speaking for them, a foothold in our imagination. Those who are most distant from our moral concern, who are least likely to be included as one of us, are the ones whose voices are not even heard, whose representatives we don't really listen to (in so far as they are politically organised), persons whose lives are so different from ours that we have trouble identifying with them – the ‘subaltern’, if you like. It seems that the unheard and unimagined – who are likely to include a large chunk of the world’s poor – need justice, or ‘loyalty’, just as much, if not more, than persons who already stand on the doorstep of our imaginations, and they need it before we eventually come to regard them as one of us.

In conclusion, the work of Molly Cochran should be mentioned. She is probably the most important commentator on Rorty's relevance for international ethics.Footnote 29 Her strongest criticism of Rorty is of his insistence on the public-private split, which she argues enables the Rortian moral self to be withdrawn and politically disinterested.Footnote 30 She gets rid of the private-public distinction and marries Rorty to feminism in order to give his pragmatism a greater political appetite. Cochran's politicisation of Rorty's position, whatever its coherence, might bring the plight of more people into the pubic sphere, but does not solve the deeper problem that some people have so little voice and are so far from our moral imaginations that they remain unlikely to be served by our greater political activity.

Linklater's Habermasian approach

Andrew Linklater's concern with reducing the tension of being ‘men’ and ‘citizens’ at the same time has been evident since the publication of his first book.Footnote 31 Compared to the other theorists discussed in this article, Linklater's approach engages most directly and explicitly with the limits imposed by the international state system and raison d'état. He explains that in contrast to the multiple and overlapping loyalties of the Middle Ages, the modern nation-state drew local loyalties to itself in order to meet the challenge of interstate war.Footnote 32 The consequence of such a stronger association between nation and state was the hardening of the moral boundaries that separated insiders from outsiders.Footnote 33 The loyalty commanded by the nation-state frequently saw citizens attach ‘more moral significance than is justified to the differences between fellow-nationals and aliens’.Footnote 34 Linklater, like other cosmopolitans, associates such exaggerated loyalty to one's fellow citizens with unfair and inconsiderate treatment of outsiders who are affected by our actions.Footnote 35

Despite the successes of the modern state and the strong centripetal pull it has exerted on communal loyalty, it has not succeeded in fully silencing the notion that there is ‘a community of humankind’ and that we ought to aspire to it.Footnote 36 Linklater notes that ‘[n]ational boundaries have been highly permeable and social bonds have displayed limited and precarious coherence in most of the territories governed by modern states’,Footnote 37 partly because contemporary European states have demanded a lesser loyalty than their antecedents.Footnote 38 Linklater's approach is to identify and develop the moral resources that lie subdued in modern states, such as the Kantian belief that the extension of rights and equal treatment to previously excluded people is inherent to modern (liberal) societies.Footnote 39

It is in the modern citizen that Linklater locates resistance to the homogenising pressures and exclusionary tendencies of nationalism. In Linklater's words, ‘[i]f modernity has the potential to make significant progress towards a universal communication community, it is because of the resources provided by the modern conceptions of citizenship’.Footnote 40 Linklater sees in modern citizenship a commitment to question the denial of legal and political rights to certain segments of the population, redistribute wealth and power, and recognise and preserve important cultural differences within the national political community.Footnote 41 While not unrelated, Linklater leaves the links between citizenship and aspirations to greater universalism, equality and sensitivity to cultural difference rather opaque. The impulse towards universalism, equality and respect for difference seems rather to lie in the modernity of Linklater's citizens. Linklater identifies the internal questioning of the morality of bounded communities as possible in communities at all stages of development, but claims such questioning to be a central feature of modernity.Footnote 42 An eagerness to systematically reflect on the scope and defensibility of one's morality is typically found under conditions of modernity and reflects a ‘particular moral psychology’, specifically, the attainment of a post-conventional stage of moral development.Footnote 43 During the pre-conventional stage of moral consciousness, individuals obey rules because they fear sanctions from a higher authority; during the conventional stage, rules are obeyed out of loyalty and to maintain the social order; while during the post-conventional stage individuals stand back from group loyalties and authority structures in order to discern principles that have only local relevance and those that have universal validity.Footnote 44 Processes of modernity, such as urbanisation and bureaucratisation, push people into situations that require cooperation but in which traditional values, conceptions of the good or decision-making principles are not readily applicable or acceptable to others from different backgrounds. In short, modernity generates the need for normative agreement with transcultural validity.

But how does one establish the wider validity of moral propositions under conditions of modernity? Linklater sides with intellectual currents that emphasise the social construction of knowledge and the drifting character of moral truth, which rules out universalist approaches that claim ‘an Archimedean perspective’.Footnote 45 Drawing on Habermas, Linklater argues that the path to universalism is through dialogue among all who stand to be affected by a norm.Footnote 46 A universal norm is one which is acceptable to all who stand to be affected by the consequences of its observance.Footnote 47Although such norms are based on an underlying consensus that might shift, Habermas predicts that once recognised, norms will not fluctuate wildly but will remain stable.Footnote 48 Participants enter conversations with the knowledge that they do not have a monopoly on moral truth and without knowing what will be agreed upon. In fact, participants have to accept that their argument might fail to convince others.Footnote 49 The use of dialogue to establish moral universals allows Linklater to pursue and reduce the tension between two opposite goals, universality and respect for cultural difference, for dialogic agreement is not tied to or imposed by a specific culture.Footnote 50

More recently, Linklater has augmented his preferred view of the moral self as someone concerned with the universal defensibility of her actions by inscribing the moral self with anxiety about harming others, a concern for alleviating suffering and for expanding empathy.Footnote 51 These additions further enmesh the moral self with the other and provide the self with a stronger impetus to be concerned with the plight of others. However, it is not clear how they fit in with the communicative aspects of Linklater's approach. Further difficulty lies therein that although Linklater's texts are shot through with erudite presentations of a wide range of thinkers, it is often hard to tell what Linklater thinks of their ideas or to discern their exact role in his argument. What is clearer is the continuity between Linklater's identification of tendencies, both real and potential, towards a universal communication community inherent in modern citizenshipFootnote 52 and his highlighting of the expanded sensitivity for the wellbeing of those beyond our national borders that has developed in international society. The trajectory Linklater sees in modern citizenship and the aforementioned expanded sensitivity towards others in international society provide the basis for some measure of solidarity with outsiders. It is also possible to locate a source of solidarity in arguments that Linklater does not make, but that would nevertheless be consistent with his project, given its Habermasian underpinnings. One could argue that the creation of dialogic, supra-national political institutions, as propagated by Linklater, would allow people with diverse cultural identities as well as those who have been uprooted from their local and national loyalties by processes of modernisation and globalisation to find solidarity in the more abstract foundation of a shared political culture, more specifically, in loyalty to a (democratic) constitution, which Habermas refers to as ‘constitutional patriotism’.Footnote 53

Linklater's aim of ‘universalism’, the creation of ‘a community that is coexistensive with the whole human race’,Footnote 54 is premised on his claims about the post-conventional self, the moral permeability of the nation-state and growing concern for harm and suffering across borders. However, he is aware that political boundaries still obstruct the universalism he seeks. Linklater therefore sees as necessary a ‘divorce of citizenship from the state’ and for it to be ‘reworked in light of multiple allegiances’ and placed with different levels of authority, such as the town, the province, the state, the region and the world.Footnote 55 This possibility is most present in the ‘pacified core’ and in Europe in particular.Footnote 56 However, Linklater does not explain how such a transformation of political community is to be extended beyond the pacified core. Habermas's own forays into International Political Theory are similarly confined to Europe.Footnote 57

Apart from the practical difficulty of extending a moral community beyond the West, Linklater's aspiration to universality contains a further problem. Linklater's use of Habermas's requirement that participants in true dialogue be post-conventional agents exposes him to the charge that this requirement excludes pre-conventional and conventional agents from moral discussion and therefore fails to be universally inclusive.Footnote 58 Linklater states explicitly that a post-conventional morality ‘reflects a particular stage in moral development’ and that the willingness to subject oneself to universalisable norms and to expand the scope of moral regard are two features of ‘the more advanced moral codes’.Footnote 59 According to Shapcott, this means that a ‘truly moral relationship between modern and pre-modern agents appears impossible because those outside of the discourse of modernity are seen, like children, as not mature enough for reasoned discussion’.Footnote 60 Thus, despite its aspiration to universal inclusion, Linklater's discourse ethics in effect restricts the types of agents who can practically participate in the conversation. Moreover, as the world's more traditional societies also tend to be the world's poorest, Linklater is likely to include large numbers of poor people from a universal communication community.

A Gadamerian approach

Richard Shapcott and Fred Dallmayr aspire to a cosmopolitan community that does justice to difference and therefore reject impartialist versions of cosmopolitanism. Writing under the influence of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, they regard the oppositional character of the so-called ‘cosmopolitan-communitarian debate’ as overdrawn because it does not take adequate account of the role of communication with those outside one's community.Footnote 61 For Gadamerian cosmopolitans, communication across borders indicates that moral boundaries are not closed.Footnote 62 This is an important step in Gadamerian cosmopolitanism's argument that a cosmopolitan community is possible. A second important step is the defining of community as an ‘act of inclusion in the moral world’.Footnote 63 This ‘loose’ definition of community, as Shapcott himself calls it, abandons a shared identity as one of the defining elements of community, which makes entry into such a community easier and allows more space for difference.Footnote 64

Both Gadamerian and Habermasian approaches emphasise dialogic solutions to moral quandaries, yet they differ about the overriding purpose of dialogue. Unlike Linklater's Habermasian approach, a Gadamerian approach does not require that consensus or agreement should be the goal of conversation. Rather, the purpose of conversation is held to be ‘understanding’, the coming to see things in a new and shared light as a result of dialogue with others. Gadamerians do not deny that consensus has its place,Footnote 65 but argue that by placing such emphasis on it, Habermasians fail to take into account that many of the moral problems we grapple with do not have or aspire to universally justifiable solutions, but are experienced as moral problems nonetheless.

Gadamerian cosmopolitans have a rosier view of the self's acculturation and situatedness than do the other theorists discussed in this article, who strongly associate acculturation with myopia and indifference to outsiders. As one would expect, Dallmayr and Shapcott reject cosmopolitan approaches that seek to monologically derive impartial and universal principles of justice, because ‘[c]ut loose from vernacular moorings and beliefs, [such] cosmopolitanism remains a mere flight of fancy, unable to engage the hearts and minds as well as the existential agonies of human beings’.Footnote 66 What is perhaps more surprising, is that Gadamerians identify similar problems in a Habermasian dialogic approach, arguing that despite efforts to ground morality, Habermasian discourse becomes ‘a quasi-transcendental platform predicated on idealised conditions of speech’ in which participants need to have momentarily suspended their ‘ordinary actions’ in order to participate.Footnote 67 The Gadamerian approach does not deny that acculturation is a brake on the self's ability to morally relate to strangers. However, in this approach, the weight of acculturation and situatedness is seen in a more positive light; less as a constraint to be overcome and more as what enables and steers the self into conversation and thus into a moral relationship with others.

Our perspective on the world is dominated by ‘what is nearest to us’.Footnote 68 Even when we attempt to look beyond what is near and familiar, ‘not in order to look away from it, but to see it better, within a larger whole and in a truer proportion’, our view remains limited to a ‘horizon’, albeit an expanded one.Footnote 69 It is an acknowledgement of our finitude, our not-knowing, that directs us towards dialogue with the other so as to expand our horizon. Conversation also makes the ideas and perspectives of other people more intelligible, without us necessarily agreeing with their points of view.Footnote 70 Understanding, ‘a fusion of horizons’, involves the sharing of a new and broader perspective that neither conversational partner could have achieved alone.Footnote 71 For Gadamer, understanding, and even consensus, is always partial and temporary as it stands in, not outside, an evolving tradition. ‘We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished’.Footnote 72 Unfortunately, Gadamer, unlike Habermas, gives little indication of the social factors that make the questioning of our own truth claims and entry into dialogue with others more likely.Footnote 73 At most, Gadamer thinks such self-questioning to be most likely in gebildete (cultured) societies, societies in which people have acquired norms that are more widely defensible as well as the capacity to acquire such norms.Footnote 74

Our shared capacity for language, in which our capacity to reason and understand resides, means that the reach of philosophical hermeneutics is potentially universal.Footnote 75 However, our shared capacity for language is on its own not enough to arrive at and support the search for just solutions to problems of coexistence. Deliberation about justice, a task of practical reason, requires some degree of solidarity among people and for Shapcott, this solidarity ought to be universal so as to mirror the universalistic drive in philosophical hermeneutics.Footnote 76 Solidarity refers to a sphere of identification or of ‘we’ feeling and can be built on as little as ‘an acknowledgement of a shared historical predicament, situation or of a common future’.Footnote 77 Importantly, solidarity is built and expanded through conversation; dialogue is both the goal of a thin cosmopolitan community and the means to get there.Footnote 78

Shapcott frequently points to the ‘radical inclusivity’ of the philosophical hermeneutical approach,Footnote 79 which is contrasted with Habermasian discourse ethics that stands accused of excluding ‘pre-modern’ agents from genuine dialogue. Dialogue, in philosophical hermeneutics, is understood as a ‘universal capacity’ and ‘radically inclusive of all linguistically constituted beings capable of understanding’.Footnote 80 Moreover, ‘[t]he creation of new solidarities requires an effort to understand and above all, engage in conversation’.Footnote 81 However, in the Gadamerian approach, openness to genuine dialogue and understanding stem from an awareness of one's finitude and a questioning of one's truth claims.Footnote 82 Although all people might presumably recognise their finitude, and even though no one is excluded in advance from genuine dialogue, individual recognition of finitude is least likely in the world's least modern societies,Footnote 83 which also tend to be the world poorest.Footnote 84 The Gadamerian approach thus succumbs to a flaw similar to the one Shapcott identified in the Habermasian approach.Footnote 85

Erkine's embedded cosmopolitanism

Toni Erskine rejects forms of cosmopolitanism that claim impartiality or rely on ‘abstract appeals to our common humanity’.Footnote 86 For her, the only realistic starting point for thinking about the moral treatment of others is against a background that gives sufficient weight to local context and particular ties. Erskine is awake to the dangers of situated moralities. These are sometimes internally oppressive and frequently insensitive to the claims of outsiders. Her focus is on moral concern for outsiders, specifically, the potential for expanding the sphere of equal moral standing, that is, ‘the realm of those whose moral worth is considered to be on par with our own when we attempt to negotiate questions of obligations in international relations’.Footnote 87 In light of her commitment to particular ties and local context, she therefore needs ‘a situated morality that can at the same time be outward-looking and inclusive’.Footnote 88 After considering the contributions of John Rawls, Alisdair MacIntyre, Mervyn Frost and, most seriously, Michael Walzer, she identifies the ideas of Marilyn Friedman as most able to help her navigate the demands of the local and the global.Footnote 89

Erskine places Friedman and herself in the tradition of ‘different voice’ feminism. This approach traces its roots to Carol Gilligan's critique of moral perspectives that emphasise rules, rights and non-interference, as opposed to the approach she favours in which there is an emphasis on care, specific relationships and unique situations.Footnote 90 In Erskine's text, the prominence given to care in Gilligan's work has fallen by the wayside. The word is mentioned occasionally, but receives little discussion. Erskine's concern seems to be that an ‘ethics of care’ would focus too strongly on existing relationships at the expense of those beyond a necessarily small circle.Footnote 91 Nevertheless, Erskine has retained different voice feminism's emphasis on the centrality of particular relationships for the moral subject.

Erskine's preference for situated morality and the moral importance she attributes to particular relationships make communitarian writings naturally attractive to her. However, she is uncomfortable with various aspects of communitarian thinking about the relation between morality and community: an intolerance of difference and an enslavement to tradition; the difficulty of internal criticism in the absence of external or impartial reference points; and a tendency to confine the moral community to national boundaries, which inadequately portrays our moral experience and diminishes the claims of outsiders. Friedman's notion of a ‘dislocated community’ seems to provide Erskine with a way out.

For Erskine, solidarity ‘arises from respect for the ethical standing of fellow moral agents with whom one ‘shares membership’ in a morally constitutive community.Footnote 92 Drawing on Friedman, it is argued that individuals are at the same time a member of a variety of identity-constituting communities. These communities are not necessarily territorially defined or communities in which we grew up, but might also include communities that are geographically dispersed and communities of choice. The self's various communal affiliations overlap and are not necessarily exclusive. By drawing on Friedman's redescription of the pattern of the self's moral affiliations, while steering clear of claims to impartiality, Erskine's embedded cosmopolitanism is able to avoid the problems she sees in communitarian views of morality, mentioned in the previous paragraph.

To accompany her use of the notion of a dislocated community, Erskine needs a conception of the moral self that is situated yet able and indeed eager to form moral relations with those beyond the borders of her political community. She finds what she is looking for in Friedman's notion of the ‘complex situated self’. While the complex situated self is shaped by the territorial, national community in which she grew up, Erskine's reference to dislocated communities allows her to reject the assumption that bounded communities have the ‘exclusive capacity to define the individual moral agent’.Footnote 93 Imagine an Iranian-born, naturalised American, who works as a biology professor in Japan, is a committed member of Greenpeace and a passionate supporter of Liverpool Football Club. According to Erskine and Friedman, such a person is a member of various ‘particular, often transnational, overlapping, territorial, and non-territorial morally constitutive communities’.Footnote 94 Viewing the moral self in this way makes it easy to see that the self is morally connected to persons beyond the borders of her political community.

Clearly, the challenge becomes ‘how to reconcile the conflicting claims, demands, and identity-defining influences of the variety of communities of which one is part’.Footnote 95 Things are thus considerably more complex than when styled in terms of a cosmopolitan-communitarian debate, which presents the options as being between loyalty to the national and the global. Instead of trying to solve the divergent demands placed on the moral self, Erskine leaves it as a matter of individual choice.

Embedded cosmopolitanism should be commended for many things, particularly for its more accurate mapping of moral relations. However, as Erskine admits, embedded cosmopolitanism is not ‘problem-free’, for, ‘[u]nlike its impartialist counterpart, it cannot claim a necessarily inclusive moral purview’.Footnote 96 One aspect of this problem is the failure of communities to overlap, since, for her, our moral regard for others is ‘inspired by shared membership within a particular community’.Footnote 97 Erskine shows how even enemies can come to recognise the moral worth of their opponents through the example of soldiers on opposing sides finding common ground in their shared Christianity during World War I. However, she also shows how no such common ground was found, and no heightening of moral regard took place, when opposing soldiers did not share a Christian background, as when Christians and Muslim Algerians fighting for France faced each other. Another area in which there is unlikely to be significant overlap is between citizens of the world's well-off countries and poor people living in the least-developed countries, a shortcoming that embedded cosmopolitanism shares with the other approaches discussed above.

Whereas impartialist cosmopolitanism centrally posits an allegiance to all human beings, embedded cosmopolitanism defines itself in negative terms ‘as preventing the sphere of equal moral standing from being coterminous with any particular community or group of communities’.Footnote 98 However, this still does not solve the problem of exclusion. In Erskine's frank diagnosis, which also applies to the other approaches discussed above, this failure to include everyone in the moral purview ‘points to the limits of an attempt to accommodate the situated self and a global sphere of equal moral standing within a single normative approach’.

Universal inclusion and asymmetric responsibility

Thus far, we have discussed four attempts to combine a universal level of moral inclusivity with both a view of justice and morality as situated and a thicker measure of solidarity than that found in impartialist forms of cosmopolitanism which posit the scope of moral concern as immediately universal. Unfortunately, all four attempts to reach a cosmopolitan destination from communitarian origins were argued to have come up short, getting stuck at what might be described as variously shaped transnational moral communities, rather than a cosmopolitan one.Footnote 99 The exclusion of some groups from our moral purview, merely because we do not or are not likely to share the requisite amount of we-feeling with them, does not diminish the injustice or harsh existence they might endure. It was argued that a significant proportion of the global poor stood to be excluded from the expanded moral communities theorised by the authors discussed above. This is a particularly glaring omission if one considers that cosmopolitan writing of the past few decades has been overwhelmingly concerned with and motivated by the extent of global poverty and the lack of global distributive justice.Footnote 100 It is worrying that in all four approaches one finds hardly any discussion of distributive justice.Footnote 101

Cosmopolitans seem to be confronted with a dilemma. They either have to adopt a sub-global reach of moral concern but with a good measure of solidarity, or insist that moral concern is global in reach but accept a diminished claim to solidarity. The theorists discussed in this article represent the former option, while impartialist cosmopolitans like Thomas Pogge and Peter Singer represent the second option.Footnote 102 What is therefore needed is a form of justice and morality that includes everyone within its scope, while offering a stronger sense of solidarity than one finds in cosmopolitan approaches that lay claim to such immediate, universal inclusivity. I want to suggest that it might be possible to reduce the tension between the twin goals of solidarity and a universally inclusive moral realm by turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas.Footnote 103 Levinas rejects claims that underneath it all our concern for the other stems from our common humanity, whether the other person is one of us, or whether he is someone with whom we have something in common. Rather, solidarity is based upon the self's asymmetrical and open-ended responsibility for the other person. The self's unequal responsibility for the other is intended to support a realm of moral concern of global scope and thus addresses the motivational deficit that has hampered impartialist forms of cosmopolitanism. Those authors who pursue a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism have also sought to address this deficit, but, as has been argued, got stuck at a moral community with transnational, rather than global, scope. In the rest of this section, I describe a Levinasian solidarity with the other and indicate how a Levinasian ethic might attach itself to a cosmopolitan morality with a genuinely universal scope.

Levinas's project is to lay bare an aspect of inter-subjectivity that Western philosophy has overlooked and suppressed: the ethical relation between the self and the other. Levinas interprets the history of Western philosophy as a persistent attempt to arrive at a universal synthesis, an effort to find a place for everything in a larger order.Footnote 104 Behind this totalising march lies the free, but vulnerable, subject – a being ‘exposed to exterior realities that shelter, but also threaten, its freedom’.Footnote 105 As the self is vulnerable to the world that surrounds it, it seeks to establish a world of order and predictability. The self is vulnerable not only to threats from the natural world, such as floods and disease, but also to the other person. What is strange and other must therefore be reduced to intelligible terms, categorised, and arranged and contained in a larger totality. In its efforts at understanding and knowledge, categorisation and conceptualisation, the free self strips the other of its otherness, chains it to a concept and puts it in its designated place in the social order.Footnote 106 For Levinas, such regard of the other as a mere cog in a wheel constitutes ‘violence’, defined as any treatment that fails to regard the other in its individuality.Footnote 107

Ironically, however, these efforts at grasping the other, at suppressing his otherness, confining him to a certain place in the social order, already suggest his otherness. Moreover, although it is possible to understand the other ‘in terms of his history, his environment, his habits’,Footnote 108 at the very moment such understanding is achieved, the other in his singularity has slipped away. As Levinas puts it, the other is ‘both graspable and escaping every hold’.Footnote 109 The other ultimately evades my grasp, not because he is too obscure to be understood and rendered intelligible, but because the other is by definition a being who refuses to be contained in a category.Footnote 110

The ethical aspects of Levinas's writing come to the fore most strongly in his phenomenological description of catching sight of the ‘face’ of the other. The face is a dense concept that connotes a number of things: First, the face of other suggests the irreducible uniqueness of the other person; a being who ultimately evades efforts at comprehension, representation, categorisation, conceptualisation and containment within a system of thought. Secondly, the face calls to mind a relationship ‘without the mediation of any principle or ideality’.Footnote 111 Normally, we relate to others as custom dictates or in terms of the social roles or categories they occupy.Footnote 112 However, in the immediacy of the face-to-face, the other ‘manifests itself in terms of itself, without a concept’ and thus pierces all conventions and conceptions that stand between us.Footnote 113 Thirdly, the face of the other evokes defencelessness and a vulnerability to my freedom – ‘the resistance of what has no resistance’ – and as a result arrests my freedom and shows it to be unjust and injurious.Footnote 114 Fourth, the face of the other issues a command against indifference to her plight. The face commands me to be responsible.Footnote 115

The face, in all its facets mentioned above, awakens me to my domination of the other and disturbs my egoism.Footnote 116 Although the exercise of my freedom may have been naïve and not intended the other any harm, ‘[t]o approach the other is to put into question my freedom, my spontaneity as a living being, my emprise over the things’.Footnote 117 It is a ‘crisis of being’ because the self sees its role in the suppression of the other as other so as to allow the self to maintain and enjoy its freedom. It is a crisis of being because the self becomes aware that its life has been a usurpation of the place of someone else. The self must confront the question of whether its being is justified,Footnote 118 for, through its mere existence, the self is implicated in the death of the other.Footnote 119 If this is so, how can the self ever hope to justify its right to be?Footnote 120

For Levinas, the rehabilitation and affirmation of the subject takes place through the other and requires that the subject negate itself and give to the other, to empty its being in an asymmetrical and infinite responsibility and concern for the other.Footnote 121 In this ethical relation with the other (to be distinguished from the political relation with the other, see below), it does not matter who the other is or what group he belongs to because the face breaks and commands through all these categories. Levinas's conception of responsibility for the other person represents a clear departure from approaches that link moral regard with a shared identity, some measure of we-feeling, or our shared humanity. Responsibility for the other derives from his irreducible difference. Furthermore, it also does not matter how the other behaves towards me; ‘he is above all the one I am responsible for’.Footnote 122 By taking up my responsibility for the other I am drawn into a deeper responsibility for him as I become involved in situations and problems that do not stem from something I have done but that are nonetheless my concern because they affect the other – I care about a better justice because that is what I want for the other. At the same time, responsibility for the other requires a constant struggle against the centripetal concern with one's own existence.Footnote 123 Levinas writes that as I increasingly ‘divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible; the more just I am, the more guilty I am’.Footnote 124This ‘persecution’ by the other is the foundation of solidarity with him and it starts with the putting in question of my freedom by the presence of the other.Footnote 125

As long as it is only the self and the other, matters are straightforward because the other always takes precedence over me. But there are always many others who also command my infinite responsibility, represented in the figure of ‘the third’.Footnote 126 In order to be just and to be able to respond to more than one other, I therefore have to limit my responsibility to the specific other and divide it among numerous others. The need to divide one's responsibility marks the beginning of equality, morality, justice and politics.Footnote 127 In the dispersal of the self's responsibility among a plurality of persons it is necessary to seek an arrangement of justice that will best achieve our responsibility for numerous others. More specifically, it becomes necessary, first, to categorise, describe, compare and judge people and their needs – to ‘compare the incomparable’;Footnote 128 second, to seek the appropriate principles of justice and standards of judgement; and third, to think about and establish the institutions through which to best achieve our responsibility for others.Footnote 129

In order to respond to numerous others it therefore becomes necessary to treat the other person as a member of a genus. Moreover, by subjecting the other to a generalised response, rather than focusing only on his needs, and by directing one's response through institutions one always comes up short in meeting one's responsibility for the other. Such suppression and neglect is tolerable as long as one stays mindful of the singularity of the other, one's unfinished responsibility towards him and one works towards a more just and sensitive order. Levinas further points out that even in the most well-intentioned institutions there lurks the constant danger that the uniqueness of the other and his situation will be overlooked as these institutions try to treat people in a more rational and objective fashion. For Levinas, ‘the negative element, the element of violence in the state, in the hierarchy, appears when the hierarchy functions perfectly, when everyone submits to universal ideas. There are cruelties because they proceed from the necessity of the reasonable Order. There are, if you like, the tears that a civil servant cannot see: the tears of the other.’Footnote 130 It is therefore imperative that institutions, even seemingly just ones, always have to be ‘perfected against their own harshness’ by being ‘made more knowing in the name, the memory, of the original kindness of man toward his other’.Footnote 131 This is a constant vigilance and effort that Levinas describes as a ‘permanent revolution’.Footnote 132

At this point, it might be useful to provide a summary and at the same time to cast the above presentation of Levinas in a slightly different light. Levinas's aim is to expose the ethical relation with the other, to be distinguished from a political relation with the other.Footnote 133 In the political relation with the other, I see him as a member of a group, as someone who fits into a category and occupies a certain place in society. Moreover, in the political relation, the other and I are equals; our interaction is impersonal and based on reciprocity, mutual respect and limited responsibility. We are allowed as much freedom as is compatible with the freedom of everyone else and entitled to enjoy this freedom with a clear conscience. In mass society, the dominant mode of our interaction is political, as Levinas acknowledges.Footnote 134 By contrast, in the ethical relation, the other is regarded as singular, as someone who ultimately cannot be contained within a category.

The ethical relation is one of intimacy and immediacy between self and other, a relation in which the self is asymmetrically and infinitely responsible to the other, irrespective of the other's response. My freedom is haunted by the sense that I have in some way harmed or neglected the other. Although the prevailing mode of interaction in society is ‘political’, the ethical relation with the other is a permanent, though often overlooked, dimension of inter-subjectivity. Levinas wants to show that every person I come across is simultaneously a specific and a general other and that the self therefore faces a choice between whether to respond ethically or politically.Footnote 135 While a political response to the other might be tolerable, my unfinished responsibility means that such a turn away from the other is tenuous, temporary and never fully legitimate or possible with a clear conscience.

From a Levinasian perspective, the debates among cosmopolitans, communitarians and all the shades in between can be understood as an attempt to figure out how to arrange and implement our responsibility in the presence of the third at a global level. Although Levinas notes in passing the problem of the ‘splitting of humanity into natives and strangers’,Footnote 136 his aim is not to make concrete suggestions about how to best balance our responsibility between people within and beyond the borders of our community, but rather to uncover what precedes and motivates our efforts at being responsible. Given the life-threatening urgency of addressing the plight of the global poor it is important to adopt a form of cosmopolitanism that allows us to immediately include them in the realm of moral concern and to make claims about the injustice they endure, rather than wait for the completion of a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism. However, one of the usual problems with a cosmopolitan morality and justice with universal scope is that people who are in a position to improve the situation of distant others who suffer injustice or moral disregard typically do not feel enough solidarity with them to do something about their plight. Those who have followed a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism have understood solidarity as based on inclusion in a morally significant community. A Levinasian perspective, by contrast, allows us to identify a self who feels solidarity with the other, not because the self shares with the other person membership of a morally significant group, but because the self recognises the injustice of its being, an awakening that opens up into an asymmetrical and open-ended responsibility for the other person, regardless of who the other person might be. It is the taking up of an open-ended and non-reciprocal responsibility for the other, rather than we-feeling, that would carry and absorb the burden of applying a universalist moral perspective.

Talk of infinite and asymmetrical responsibility certainly seems radical, but there are many elements in cosmopolitanism that reminds one of a Levinasian sensibility. It is possible to identify flashes of unreciprocated generosity in cosmopolitanism, as well as moments in which the self recognises its damaging freedom and usurpation of the place of the other, for example, in Linklater's recognition that we cause ‘abstract harm’ to distant others, or Pogge's repeated demonstrations of our involvement in maintaining a global economic order that predictably results in the deaths of millions of poor people every year,Footnote 137 or cosmopolitanism's constant questioning of the moral legitimacy of national boundaries. To be sure, at bottom, cosmopolitan and Levinasian positions are very different. Cosmopolitanism always makes it possible for the self to limit its responsibility for the other,Footnote 138 whereas Levinas sees our responsibility as infinite. While Levinasian responsibility travels to more demanding depths, Levinasian ethics and cosmopolitanism both move in the same direction, that is, towards an order that is more generous and responsive to the other.

Conclusion

Cosmopolitanism's frequent assertion of a universal realm of justice and moral concern has often been shot down by communitarian critics who argue that justice and morality find their truest expression in a situated community, that cosmopolitans underestimate the hold of local values and loyalties, and that whatever global solidarity exists is too thin to sustain the sacrifice, effort and cooperation one would need for justice and moral regard to be universal in practice. This article considered four attempts to bridge this cosmopolitan-communitarian divide by a group of authors who accept an understanding of justice as situated and agree that solidarity is necessary to realise social justice, while at the same time consider the goal of cosmopolitan justice to be desirable and possible. Following ‘a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’ was described as the gradual expansion of a situated community's realm of moral concern to the point of universal inclusion. However, it was argued that the four attempts to reach a cosmopolitan destination from communitarian starting points were likely to fall short, establishing transnational moral communities of various shapes, rather than a cosmopolitan one. The world's poor were particularly likely to be excluded. Given the inability of a the four communitarian paths to cosmopolitanism to reach a universal level of moral inclusion, coupled with the imperative of including the world's poor in any type of cosmopolitan justice, cosmopolitans seem to be left with little option but to adopt a form of cosmopolitanism that is immediately universally inclusive. As such forms of cosmopolitanism face the problem of a motivational deficit, it was suggested in the latter part of this article that such a deficit might be bridged by an infinitely and asymmetrically responsible moral subject, as found in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. A Levinasian sensibility is not as farfetched as it may seem, for it makes contact with elements that can frequently be spotted in cosmopolitanism, such as unreciprocated generosity, considerable moral self-questioning, expiation, deep concern for the wellbeing of others and a worry that we are usurping that to which others also have a claim.

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